Good evening, Madam Chair.

We are live.

Thank you so much, Madam Clerk.

My name is Angelique Ashby.

I am Mayor Pro Tem of the City of Sacramento and chair of the PE, a committee that we are going to participate in here tonight.

Want to thank everybody who is on the call here or on the Zoom for participating.

We have a small but mighty agenda in front of us.

So I'm going to do the best I can to keep us moving through it as uh efficiently as possible.

Madam Clerk, would you like to start with your initial comments and roll call, please?

Certainly.

We'll start with roll call.

Member Harris.

I am here.

Member Valenzuela.

Member Lowy.

Madam Chair.

I am here.

And will you let us know when Mr.

Lalowy arrives as well, please?

Yes, ma'am.

So you said tonight we do have a full agenda.

If you're ready, we'll start with the first item.

That sounds great.

So our first item is the interview for the youth appointments to various city boards and commissions.

This is a unique opportunity, and that this is the introduction of these three seats to the committees of the Parks and Communicate Community Enrichment Commission, the Sacramento Arts, Culture and Creative Economy Commission, and then the Sacramento Community Police Commission.

So these will be inaugural appointments you're making soon on these seats.

And the key the qualification is unique, and that candidates at their time of appointment must be ages 14 to 32, or I'm sorry, 22.

Getting a little ahead of myself.

And so we um members, some of these uh uh applicants have expressed interest in various seats, so we thought we would interview them through you know, A through Z and ask them as our first question.

What is your preferential commission and why?

And the second question we'll be asking is also a little different tonight.

It will be please share with us your community service background that makes you a quality qualified candidate for these seats.

That's fantastic.

We're really excited.

So to my colleagues and to the applicants tonight, what we're gonna do is interview and then we'll make the decisions about the appointments to all three of the boards at a later PMPE meeting.

So that gives us some time to kind of look through their applications and hear from them.

As you heard, we're kind of doing this differently.

Normally we take this one board at a time.

Instead, we're taking this a category at a time.

So this will be all youth that are applying for three different boards, which is why we're asking them to identify for us which one is their priority because some of them chose more than one that they would be interested in.

So we'll go ahead and move on with the interviews.

I know that the uh young people who wanted to were given an opportunity to have a practice or mock run through last night.

Uh but still don't be nervous.

It's fine, just be yourself.

We are we are here to help you succeed.

All right, madam clerk, let's let's go through.

All right, our first candidate is Ashkaj Meta.

All right, Aksha, go ahead.

Um good evening, everybody.

My name is Alex Metha, and I am a junior attending Atomas Pacific Pathways Prep, and I reside in District One.

And uh and the commission that I would like to serve on is the Sacramento Arts, Culture and Creative Economy Commission because of my passion for arts and creativity.

I'm a published author and I've written and published four books, and my first one was published when I was only eight years old.

And all of the proceeds have actually gone to children's charities.

And I think that my perspective would provide a different view on this board because of my writing and its correlation with current events because I'm also a contributing editor and writer for N magazine and uh I'm the creator of Rightfully.com, which is a website for young students to publish their writing pieces.

I currently has three contributing editors, and last fall I actually collaborated with Northern Thomas Scheib with my website and for an event for NUSD district students, mostly elementary school, and I'm currently collaborating with Locke Sacramento for high school student advocacy and connecting writing to that.

Um my community service uh lies with a lot of it around writing and teaching, really.

I've tutored elementary students in math for four years at American Lakes Elementary.

I've led and participated in multiple park cleanups with Yak and book drives, clothing and food drives for different nonprofits in the city of Sacramento.

I'm a student reporter for California Journalism Initiative, and we write stories about student schools and districts.

And uh I'm a contributing editor for N magazine and throughout throughout the challenges of distance learning and events uh since last year in March, I found that writing is really great outlet and necessary for growth for me as a person, and I really want to share that passion to other youth in the city.